On the Position Selection of Relays in Diamond Relay Networks

The diamond relay network is an efficient cooperative networking configuration in which the source node cooperates with two selected neighbors. For such networks, we investigate the impact of the relay positioning on the performance. In particular, considering an opportunistic protocol based on the use of relaying buffers, we provide sets of constraints which, when satisfied, give sufficient conditions for simultaneously guaranteeing network stability and throughput improvement. These results are given for both symmetric and asymmetric relay locations. In contrast to prior work dealing with the diamond relay network, we also break the strong hypothesis of no interlink interference between the source and relay transmissions. Our results provide design guidelines for relay selection by establishing areas of feasible relay locations, whilst also identifying optimal positions which lead to maximum throughput gain.